Google announced today on their blog that you can add the Google +1 Button to your own website with some very simple code. So, here I am to show you how to customize your own WordPress theme to add it yourself!
Google makes it really simple with their new API, all you have to do is inside your WP dashboard just to go “Appearance”, and then “Editor” and click on the “footer.php” file (link is in the right sidebar).
Then just copy and paste the code before your closing body and html tags as in this image:
(click image for full size)
Then, choose where you want the button to appear, and add it in the appropriate place. For this website, we chose to add it only on full single post pages, so we clicked on “single.php” in the editor from the dashboard and added the single line of code like this right after the_content line (so it would appear after the post – like we wanted):
(click image for full size)
Where you put it is of course up to you entirely. According to the official WordPress post big sites like Huffington Post, Mashable, TechCrunch, Best Buy, Reuters, The Washington Post, Nordstrom, and Rotten Tomatoes are adding it as well. If you use the Facebook like button, why not have this one too (it could mean more search traffic from Google!).
To bad that +1 button is only for English results from google.com. According to Google Blog they will add this future in other languages too which is amazing.
I would like to hear your guys opinion on how this will effect future search results and seo, I’m sure this will become built into their normal algorythm
It will affect it like anything else, Google currently used more than 200 “ranking signals” when determining your online authority. The +1 button and the new Chrome spam filter just add 2 more…
Sweet, I’ve been wondering how to add Google +1. You’ve got to keep up with the times I guess!